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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 236 posts.

2018
36

How Does Mastodon Work?

I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.

37

Functional core, imperative shell (2012)

Purely functional code makes some things easier to understand: because values don't change, you can call functions and know that only their return value matters—they don't change anything outside themselves. But this makes many real-world applications difficult: how do you write to a database, or to the screen? In…

41

Web application from scratch, part I

This is the first in a series of posts in which I'm going to go through the process of building a web application (and its web server) from scratch in Python. For the purposes of this series, I'm going to solely rely on the Python standard library and I'm going to ignore the WSGI standard.

48

JavaScript is Good, Actually

The subtext of many discussions around building software in Electron and React/Native involve this assumption that JavaScript is bad. There is a kind of unspoken understanding that JavaScript developers are stuck writing it, that either:

51

Why Static Websites Need HTTPS

It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point" [https://www.troyhunt.com/https-adoption-has-reached-the-tipping-point/], that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point] and as I said at the

52

Gmail Icons are Hard

nikitonsky: Default mode for GMail action panel is icons. Icons are great: they take little space, don’t need to be translated. Only one caveat: more often than not there’s no good, well-understood icon for your action.

55

An SVG that always shows today's date

For my contact page, I wanted a generic calendar icon to let people view my diary. Calendar icons are almost always a skeuomorph of a paper calendar, but I wondered if I could make it slightly more useful by creating a dynamic icon. Here it is, an SVG calendar which always display's today's date: The background image…